


Petrichor

by momebie (katilara)



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-09
Updated: 2019-04-09
Packaged: 2020-01-07 04:20:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,041
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18402989
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/katilara/pseuds/momebie
Summary: It was such a common everyday smell, the rain. Death was an occasion. It was momentous, a violent wrenching from one plane of existence to another. It should at least smell of something sharp and warning like ozone, like the creatures that had violently wrenched their way through him in life, or sweet and burning, like the incense Klaus used to light in his room when they were teenagers, to hide the smell of his cigarettes and joints.Then again, maybe the rain was perfect. When you looked at it in the big picture, death was also a common everyday occurrence. Not for a person. For a person death was momentous. But on the scale ofpeople, death was inevitable, common, everyday. Like rain.





	Petrichor

**Author's Note:**

> This is a fill for a drabble prompt meme [over on my Tumblr](http://charmingpplincardigans.tumblr.com/). I was given "petrichor and TUA". I remain terrible at drabbles, but it's just because I have so many feelings about every one of these jerks. Especially Ben and Klaus.

For Ben, death smelled like rain and damp.

He would be lying if he said he’d thought it would smell like something else, because really he’d never given any thought to it. When he was living, all he knew about death he knew from what Klaus shared with them, and Klaus was mostly interested in gossip and the particular fears the living have about nothingness, neither of which were useful if you were already actually dead. Ben had certainly never thought the smell that clung to him in his death would be the very specific smell of rainwater evaporating from dirty puddles in the courtyard garden on a humid summer day.

Today the whole city smelled like their courtyard garden. It had started raining the night before and only now let up just after noon. The apartment Klaus was crashing in didn’t have central air, so several of the windows in the bedroom and living room had been left open in spite of the rain in hopes of catching a cross breeze. There was no breeze to catch though, and it left the apartment feeling muggy and claustrophobic.

There was very little that could make a boy with no body feel claustrophobic, but somehow watching Klaus fitfully sweat through sheets that didn't belong to him did it. Ben perched approximately on the windowsill, rested his chin in his hands, and waited.

Klaus woke with a gasp that rolled into a coughing fit. He lurched to sitting, tearing at the sheets until they fell away, and wrapped his long arms around his thin waist. There was still bruising on his ribs and a scrape on his chin from the bender he’d been through the weekend before that had left Ben unable to manifest for close to four days. Klaus wouldn’t talk to Ben about it, which worried Ben, because usually Klaus wouldn’t shut up about the stupid shit he got up to, especially if it was stupid shit Ben did not want to hear about. All Ben knew was that when he'd finally been able to come back through, Klaus was in a city police holding pen, crouched on the floor next to the single toilet bowl, resting his head against the dingy porcelain.

“Get some water,” Ben said. “Just water.”

Klaus flicked him off. “Why don’t you get it for me?”

“I would, but you see, my hands go right through the glasses.” For emphasis, he leaned forward and swatted at Klaus’s foot where it was sticking out from under the sheet. His hand went through both the foot and the mattress as if he wasn't really there. Because he wasn't.

Klaus jerked his foot away. “You’re cold,” he hissed.

Ben leaned back and shoved his hands into his jacket pockets. “I can’t be cold. You can't make nothing cold.”

“Bullshit,” Klaus grumbled. “You're something. All you dead, all fucking freezing all the time.” He rolled off the mattress and staggered to the bathroom in his altogether, leaving the sheets behind in a rumpled mess.

That was another part of being dead that Ben never would have predicted, that he’d have to endure Klaus’s naked body and his negative amounts of shame at least 25% of the time he was anywhere at all. Ben sometimes wistfully wished he’d been able to attach himself to one of his less weird siblings, but then he remembered that he didn’t have any less weird siblings and that if he had to listen to Luther or Diego’s self-righteous bullshit as often as he had to see Klaus naked he would probably absolutely snap. He did sometimes wish he could check in on Allison and Vanya, but Allison was in LA and Vanya avoided the rest of them at all costs. Ben couldn’t blame either of them.

He heard the water start up in the shower, so he pulled a book from the inside pocket of his jacket and began to read. It seemed to be Dostoevsky this time. Or, well, Dostoevsky filtered through the lens of Knowing Death, which never made the Russian authors any more sanguine, but did sometimes manage to temper the French authors just a bit. He still hadn’t figured out where the books came from or why or when they changed, but since he’d settled into the idea that this would be his afterlife until Klaus figured out a way to untie them or overdosed, he figured he’d read whatever came to him. He wasn’t in the mood for the existential terror of the mind of the common man though, so he gave up and looked out the window to study the drying city street.

It was such a common everyday smell, the rain. Death was an occasion. It was momentous, a violent wrenching from one plane of existence to another. It should at least smell of something sharp and warning like ozone, like the creatures that had violently wrenched their way through him in life, or sweet and burning, like the incense Klaus used to light in his room when they were teenagers, to hide the smell of his cigarettes and joints.

Then again, maybe the rain was perfect. When you looked at it in the big picture, death was also a common everyday occurrence. Not for a person. For a person death was momentous. But on the scale of _people_ , death was inevitable, common, everyday. Like rain.

Klaus opened the bathroom door and Ben was thankful to find he’d wrapped a faded yellow towel around his waist. He leaned against the door frame and lit a cigarette and smoked half of it while watching Ben watch him.

“Have you ever thought about coming back as a cat?” he asked. “You’d make a great familiar, all your silent looming.”

“I think we’ve moved well past _familiar_ ,” Ben said.

“Aw, what’s a little skin between brothers?” Klaus asked. “I don’t have anything you’ve never seen before.” He turned around to ash the cigarette into the toilet and then walked through the bedroom with his gaze on the scuffed wood floor to avoid tripping over the small piles of dirty clothing collected there.

Ben hopped off the windowsill and landed silently. He followed Klaus to the small living room, where Klaus stubbed the cigarette out onto the windowsill and tossed the butt out the window, and then into the barely partitioned kitchen.

“Yes, I believe that’s the stated problem.”

Klaus waved him off with a slow, halting raise of his right arm and opened the fridge.

The fridge and the apartment it was in belonged to a waiter named Jason who worked at a pizza place a couple blocks away. Upon being released from lock up Klaus had gone first to his dealer, and then to get as much food as he could with the few dollars he had left. He’d fallen smitten for the green eyes and pouting lips on the young man taking his crumpled cash almost immediately.

If there was one thing Klaus couldn’t resist it was uppers. If there was a second thing Klaus couldn’t resist it was an open, handsome face.

Klaus’s ambivalence for gender—both his own and that of the people he was attracted to—had not been a surprise for Ben when it manifested. The surprise always came when Klaus did not gravitate toward people like him. By which Ben guessed he meant other addicts or mediums, people who were constantly giving themselves away in some way or another. No, Klaus looked for bright eyes, easy smiles, an aura of uncomplicated wants.

It would be easy from the outside to assume these people were marks, that he was looking for people who would believe him, take him in without too many questions, and he probably was a little. But while Ben could admit that Klaus was definitely using these people for their kindness, he did not think Klaus thought he was using these people. Klaus was looking to build short term, mutually beneficial relationships. It was just that all Klaus had to offer was his body and if the face was pretty enough he had no compunction about going ahead and handing himself over. You couldn’t tell a person’s soul from their face, though, and sometimes this worked out better than others.

Sometimes he could lean against a counter in a small but tidy kitchen, almost naked, and eat cold Chinese takeout right out of the container without worrying about what came next. Sometimes he was still moving slowly and favoring his right side a week later, which made Ben worry a lot about what came next. Especially when Ben only saw the aftermath and didn’t know who to look out for in the future.

“Are you afraid of this?” Ben asked.

“This lo mein?” Klaus responded, mouth full. “It's been here longer than I have, but it smells okay, so not really.”

That wasn’t what Ben meant, but he figured Klaus knew that. “You've been here two days. What if he was going to eat that?”

“Everyone knows that if you leave leftovers to sit for more than a night they're as good as trash already. I'm doing him a favor.”

“Klaus,” Ben said.

There wasn't any use trying to argue Klaus's level of helpfulness with him, but he didn't want to lose his turn in the conversation, lest Klaus decide it was over and take the lo mein back to bed to smoke up and wait for his pretty waiter, effectively ending Ben's ability (or desire, he hadn't quite mastered manifesting in and out when he wanted yet, which meant he’d accidentally seen and heard Klaus have enough sex to last him five different afterlives) to communicate with anyone for hours.

“Beeeeeeeen,” Klaus said back, dragging his name out to a point.

Ben really missed being a person who didn't have to depend on the focus of his most distracted sibling in order to just plain exist, but he also knew that Klaus’s ability to tie him to even this weak existence was the reason Klaus was the way he was. It was one thing to channel your brother. It was another thing entirely to be open to every lonely or angry spirit that passed by.

It had been five years now since Ben died, but because of Klaus's reluctance to be sober and pay attention they were still testing the boundaries of how the tether between them worked or why Ben couldn't manifest to anyone else. Maybe it really was that there was no one else to manifest to, in which case the other spirits weren’t likely to leave Klaus alone any time soon.  

Outside the rain started up again. It rattled against the windows and pelted the street, enveloping them in a pocket of gentle white noise. Ben was struck by how this was probably one of the kindest moments the two of them had ever shared. No demanding father, no demanding villain, no demanding social situation, no one depending on them doing anything at all. And it only took one of them dying to get them here.

Klaus tipped the takeout container up and scraped the last of the noodles into his mouth. He dropped the container in the trash and the fork into the sink. Ben crossed his arms and glared at him. Klaus sighed, washed the fork with some soap and his fingers and then placed it back into the silverware drawer, which he slammed shut to let Ben know just what he thought about the mothering.

He moved back to the living room window, but he didn’t light another cigarette. Klaus simply lowered himself slowly and gently onto his knees in a crouch next to an ugly green beat up couch. He propped his hands on the sill and his chin on his hands. The towel loosened around his waist as he spread his knees to bracket them against the wall, but he didn’t seem to notice. It didn’t fall away, so Ben didn’t say anything.

The rain continued to fall. Klaus looked so small there against the gloomy grey backdrop of the sky and the building across the street, purple blooms of bruising fading to a similar grey across his back. He pressed his forehead to the bottom pane of the opened window and stuck his nose out into the warm wet air. He inhaled deeply, like a man who'd been drowning and had just broken the surface back to life above the water. He closed his eyes and continued breathing steadily for several long minutes, his chest expanding and then falling flat dramatically with each breath, before giving a final deep exhale and pulling back.

“I don’t know,” he said softly, finally answering Ben's question.

Ben climbed onto the couch. He planted his feet in the space just above the cushions and perched as close to the back of it as he could manage so he wouldn’t look unsettling sitting in mid-air. He’d been practicing meeting surfaces without really feeling them ever since Klaus complained it was creepy when he stood too still, especially if his feet weren’t really on the ground.

Klaus took another steadying breath in and out. It fogged up the bottom of the window. “I think maybe I know too much to be afraid.”

“That doesn’t usually stop people,” Ben said.

“No,” Klaus said. “Probably not. But we’re not just people are we?”

“We are now.”

They had never been just people, but Ben didn’t think it was their powers that did that to them. Plenty of people could do things other people couldn’t do: paint, draw, sing, handle bank accounts really well, whatever. The thing that set them apart was the life they had been forced to live. Their father had set them apart, made them a spectacle. He had made them into a promise, but the promise had never been to them.

“Maybe,” he conceded. “I’m at least four people, I think.”

“You’re sure trying to be. We’re only twenty-two man, slow down. You don’t have to live it all at once.”

Klaus tilted his head. He laid his cheek on the backs of his hands and looked up at Ben. There was a breeze finally coming in with the storm and it ruffled his hair, which was drying in feathery fly-aways. “Don’t you wish you had?”

“No,” Ben said. He didn't even have to think about it. He’d had enough time to come to terms with that. There was no use being sad over what wasn’t. He wasn’t alive, but he was still here, there were still things he could do. Or watch Klaus do.

Klaus hummed in response. He held Ben’s gaze, blinking slowly, sleepily. “Do you want me to be afraid? Do you think it will shape me up? Make me a proper man like father demands I try to be?”

“I think he’s had enough say. And I think there’s been enough fear.”

Klaus nodded.

The sound of a key in the lock of the door made Klaus jump, but he didn’t move. Ben could see his breathing speed up just a little, but he didn’t know if it was in residual fear from some other experience, or in anticipation of this one. He did know it wouldn’t make a difference. Klaus would do what Klaus always did and this other young man would accept that he was still there or he would not. Ben at least felt confident that the worst that could happen with this one would be that Klaus was shoved out the door in just the towel, but it probably wouldn’t come to that.

“I thought you’d be gone,” Jason said as he closed the door behind him. This one really was as guileless as he looked, and Ben could tell by the way he was fighting to keep the smile off his face that Klaus would be fine for another night at least.

At least Klaus wouldn’t be on the street. At least Ben could relax and go back to merely being annoyed that he was tied to this voracious jerk of a person. A voracious jerk of a person that he…loved. Which is not a thing they had told each other as kids, because it wasn’t a thing their father had ever thought it was important to build into them, but whether by circumstance or attention it had become true. It was the only explanation for the worry.

Klaus looked to Ben, to see if Ben had an opinion about this situation one way or another. When Ben didn't say anything he closed his eyes and counted to five. Then he sat up straight, gripped the window tight, and tilted his head back as far as he could go so that he was looking at Jason upside down.

“Do you want me to be gone?” he asked, voice back to his usual sing-sing showman’s cadence. Pay no attention to the broken boy behind the curtain. “It’s so wet out. I just thought I’d wait it out.”

“In a towel?”

“I showered. Thought you'd want me cleaner than you left me.” Klaus raised his eyebrows. “I can take it off if you like.”

Jason approached the couch and held his hand out. “Leave it on for now.”

Klaus pouted, but he reached to hold the towel up as he twisted around and let Jason pull him to standing. Ben caught the small grimace that came from Klaus having his sore and tender body pulled too straight too quickly. He wondered if Jason noticed, but figured it probably didn’t matter. Klaus wouldn’t accept babying from him or anyone else. Klaus wasn’t there to be put back together. Klaus was there for a good time until he shook himself apart entirely. Until he and Ben could match. That was also probably love of a sort.

Ben turned away from them as Klaus pulled Jason in for a kiss. This he didn’t need to see again. He just had to sit it out until Klaus took enough of whatever was on offer to wipe him away for a bit, but until then he would sit with his book and his own worries for a change and the smell of the rain.

 


End file.
